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The Unveiling of Rembrandt Peale
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10388 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1993 |
1,550 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
Unless it be a color photograph of a celebrity, portraiture these days tends to be a forgotten art. Once, however--before the camera was invented--portraiture was the only way of recording a likeness. Good exhibitions of painted portraits offer three things: arresting images of memorable individuals; a profile of the era in which they lived; and a meditation, however indirect, on the art of portraiture itself.
This is profoundly true of In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778-1860, which is at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington through February 7. And it includes something else in the bargain: the chance to see at close range an artist who, in spite of his distinguished pedigree, remains surprisingly unknown.
Rembrandt was one of four surviving sons of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), a titan of early American art with a penchant for naming his children after Old Master painters he admired (the other three sons were named Raphaelle, Titian, and Rubbens).
Charles Willson was some thing of a Renaissance man--among other things, he was a painter; a naturalist, and an inventor--as well as a friend of Thomas Jefferson's. Among his scientific achievements was the excavation of a mastodon skeleton, which Rembrandt and Rubens took to London for exhibition. (Some of Rembrandt's drawings of this relic are included in the current exhibition.)
Rembrandt's brother Raphaelle (1774-1825) was the greatest still life painter this country has ever produced. Yet Rembrandt remains largely unknown. He is scarcely mentioned in any of the major textbooks on American art, and when he is, it is normally in the context of his most public--and inferior-- work, the monumental, celebratory images of George Washington. It seems that when the National Gallery of Art purchased the remarkable Rubens Peale with a Geranium of 1801 several years ago--the painting that is quite possibly Rembrandt's greatest masterpiece--it raised his profile somewhat in the eyes of scholars and the public. But it needed an exhibition such as this one, which as far as I know is the first of its kind, to really give us a clear idea of what sort of artist Rembrandt Peale was. In a nutshell, this exhibition shows us an artist most comfortable when describing the gentler, more private aspects of human personality. The heroic mode was not for him.
Peale comes at the end of a great line of American portraitists that began with John Singleton Copley and continued through Rembrandt's
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